Ignorance of science leads to bad policy
To the editor:
I loved Kevin Cook's article on "Science Wins Food Fights" on Thanksgiving Day that told us, when the Supreme Court in 1893 proclaimed the tomato to be a vegetable, that it "confirmed that biologically illiterate people can rise to positions of authority where they can be dumb as rocks and still get paid."
Over 100 years later, they are still with us. From two senate candidates' dumb statements on rape to the many federal and state legislators who don't "believe" in evolution (as if science were some kind of belief system), we still see the illiteracy.
U.S. Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia, who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, recently told an audience that the science he learned in school was "lies straight from the pit of hell." This science illiterate, who believes that the world is 9,000 years old (that's equivalent to believing that the distance between New York and Los Angeles is about 10 yards) is a medical doctor, who apparently doesn't realize the importance of evolution to medical research.
Rep. Michele Bachmann's statements on evolution are equally ignorant and inane, and Sen. Marco Rubio just stated that the age of the Earth is a "great mystery." No, it isn't; we know the age of the earth is about 4.5 billion years. What universities did these people attend?
Unfortunately much of the illiteracy comes from fundamentalist religion, people who are fearful of what science finds out because it conflicts with the ancient Hebrew mythology and metaphor found in the Old Testament that they wrongly take literally. More importantly, they actually want this taught as science. More serious than whether tomatoes are vegetables, science denial has to stop because in today's world it imperils our science education and thus our future.